Thinking Ahead

The Sunshine Coast Treeline project has finished for this year, but we hear that it will be back in 2012, so I'm starting to think ahead looking at ways trees are being celebrated with new technologies- in virtual worlds and in the real world. Maybe some ideas will come out of it for 2012.

The first is a brilliant tree build at the Museum of Singapore, traditionally associated with a grand old Banyan Tree, but now with a new, glowing metal contemporary take on the Banyan. The Farm site http://www.farm.sg/work/project/the_tree has images of the tree in the gardens, with people interacting in much the same way they might with a real banyan, as well as drawings and specifications showing how the tree was made.

The Breath of Life is another project over at Design Milk (http://design-milk.com/a-breath-of-life-by-fraser-ross/#more-61797) that caught our eye. While this first version isn't quite a tree yet, there are lots of possibilities here.Scotland -based artist Fraser Ross has used shape changing alloy and LEDs to create a plant that reacts to the carbon in the human breath. There's a video on the site showing how the plants light up, move and change. Pretty usual stuff in virtual worlds, but not so easy to do in real life.